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Hands down, one of the most consequential pieces of ceramics to emerge last century has to be the Bedfordshire urinal, which in 1917 was available for purchase at JL Mott Ironworks, a plumbing supply company in Manhattan's Flatiron District. Not tha...

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Nearly a decade has passed since Jersey Boys, the behind-the-scenes musical that gives glossy treatment to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, first opened on Broadway in 2005. The ensuing years have not been kind to several of its jukebox rivals. H...

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When it comes to dysfunction, St. Louis' Busch clan has nothing on the Wyeths, the incisive, caustic and sometimes-tender family of privilege that took up residence last Friday at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. Oh, these Wyeths! They've gathere...

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"Joe, we'll be happy, Joe, won't we?" Maggie, the amorous teenager says to her betrothed in Winners, one of two plays in Irish playwright Brian Friel's Lovers, which West End Players Guild opened last Friday at the Union Avenue Christian Church.
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In Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed, the central issue is that Mitchell, a closeted gay actor whose star is on the rise, inches closer to coming out publicly on the cusp of a huge movie deal. His agent, Diane, is dead-set against it, th...

on February 13, 2014

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It would be hard to overstate the influence Henri Cartier-Bresson has had on modern photography. As the eldest son of wealthy textile producers, he refined his eye for formal composition under the tutelage of the post-cubist artist Andr Lhote, soon...

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Writing in the aftermath of World War II, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously observed that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, a stark position that he later revised, allowing that "perennial suffering has as much right to...

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Gerry Connor, the boozy, mercurial and broken orphan at the center of Tom Holloway's Forget Me Not, is a man unlucky, unkempt and unknown. As a child growing up in Liverpool, Gerry was taken from his mother at the age of four and shipped to Australi...

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"Women usually do not appear unless to provide some sort of illicit service," Juliana Smithton, the drug researcher at the fractured core of Sharr White's intricately disorienting The Other Place, tells the audience while describing a troubling "epi...

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In an art world hungry for fresh talent, artists at midcareer often inhabit an uncomfortable zone: The electrifying work that first made them art stars now seems dated, and they must often reinvent themselves, maturing their practice lest their earl...

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Here's a question: What would it look like to mount an exhibition whose organizing principle was the idea of the non sequitur? Not a show whose thematic current contained the occasional chance element, but one that took the idea of disconnection as ...

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I want you to look at the whole economic system as one enormous tit," Lyman Felt, the lusty, ferociously articulate and unreformed bigamist at the heart of Arthur Miller's The Ride Down Mount Morgan, tells his nurse in the play's opening lines. "So ...

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A string quartet, says Elliot, a brainy and machinating violinist, is a "discourse among four reasonable people." The musician is quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to describe the inner workings of the Lazara Quartet, his own ensemble of violins, v...

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Theater is the art of embellished storytelling. An event unfolds, but to relate it properly to an audience you need costumes, lights, a stage and at least one actor to better handle the emotional moments. But what if your story is so good that it ne...

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Calendar years don't mean a lot in the theater world. Some theater companies begin in September, others in January. Some companies operate exclusively in the summertime. Nevertheless, 'tis the season to pause and appreciate, so here are a dozen thea...

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An aura of nostalgia permeates The Mousetrap, this month's holiday offering at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. Nostalgia, due not to the advancing age of Agatha Christie's 1952 whodunit - nor because of any affection for its lofty stature as the...

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Christmas plays unfold in a formulaic manner: It's almost Christmas, then something could potentially impede or ruin Christmas, and then Christmas happens, cue "Joy to the World." William Gibson's The Butterfingers Angel, Mary & Joseph, Herod the Nu...

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It's not just stockings that get stuffed at Christmastime. So too do area theaters. Beginning this week, the December calendar becomes clogged with too many shows to review on one page. Here instead is a preview of the bounty that awaits the dedicat...

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It all started with She Loves Me.
Soon after I returned to St. Louis in 2001, after having spent 22 years in New York and Los Angeles, I was approached about writing theater reviews for the Riverfront Times. My distant memories of St. Louis theat...

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Midway through Act One of Sister Act, the ingratiating musical that is currently on view at the Fox Theatre, a shy police officer named Eddie Souther (Chester Gregory, reprising the role he created on Broadway) imagines what it might be like if he w...